important. I don't do it because I have
no choice. I do what I do because I'm
broken, too."
T Stevenson's mother,
Alice Golden, like that of mil-
lions of other African-Americans, took
part in the Great Migration from the
rural South to the urban North in the
early twentieth century. They went
from Virginia to Philadelphia, where
Alice was born. She later reversed the
customary trajectory when she mar-
ried Howard Stevenson, in , and
went south with him, a little more
than a hundred miles, to his home
town of Milton, in rural Delaware.
They had three children: Howard,
Bryan, and Christy.
"You have to understand that there
are two Delawares," Howard Steven-
son told me. "The north, around
Wilmington, is basically part of the
North, but we lived in the south, which
was part of the South. It was very rural,
very country. We lived basically in the
woods, farm country. We lived next
door to my uncle and aunt, and he
used to slaughter hogs."
Their mother never forgot her roots
in Philadelphia. "She didn't want us
to grow up with a southern-Delaware
frame of mind," Howard said. "She
did all she could to make sure we never
forgot the rest of the world. There
were places around us with no run-
ning water, so Philly was the gateway
to the rest of the world." Alice Ste-
venson placed a heavy emphasis on
education; Christmas presents were
microscopes, not footballs. She also
had strong views on racial equality.
"Some of the black folks in southern
Delaware were much more deferen-
tial in the face of white people," How-
ard said. "Her style was di erent. She
didn't believe in accepting any kind
of racism." Once, when Bryan was in
first grade, she wrote a letter to the
town newspaper calling for the inte-
gration of the local public schools.
Another time, a few years later, she
protested when the town's public-
health o cers asked the black chil-
dren to stand at the back of the line
to receive their polio vaccines. "She
made such an issue of it that for a
moment we weren't sure if they'd even
give us our shots," Bryan recalls.
In the sixties, when the Stevenson
children were growing up, the neigh-
borhoods, schools, and swimming
pools of southern Delaware were all
segregated, in fact if not by law. "There
was never a time you could get the
majority of people in Alabama or Mis-
sissippi, or even southern Delaware,
to vote to end segregation," Bryan told
me. "What changed things was the
rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board
of Education was ushered in by a
movement, but it was a legal decision.
And so, for me, I went down the law
path, because to be a politician trying
to do anti-discrimination work meant
you had to work in a handful of com-
munities that were basically majority
black." The jurisdiction of the courts
applied everywhere.
Both of Bryan's parents had long
commutes to jobs in the northern part
of the state. Alice Stevenson had a ci-
vilian post at Dover Air Force Base
and became what would later be called
an equal-opportunity o cer, working
to insure that African-Americans re-
ceived fair housing and education. Al-
bert Stevenson was a lab technician
at a General Foods plant in Dover.
"We believed that our dad thought he
could feed us completely based on
what he snuck home from G.F.," Bryan
told me. "I've avoided Jell-O since I
was ten." The Stevenson children ab-
sorbed their mother's lessons. How-
ard Stevenson is a professor of urban
education and Africana studies at the
University of Pennsylvania; Christy,
the youngest of the three children,
teaches music at an elementary school
in Delaware.
Bryan followed Howard to East-
ern College, a small Baptist-a liated
school outside Philadelphia, where he
majored in history and philosophy.
Then he applied to Harvard Law
School, which turned out to be a dis-
appointment. "The courses seemed es-
oteric and disconnected from the race
and poverty issues that had motivated
me to consider the law in the first
place," he wrote in his memoir. But as
a second-year student, in December,
, he took a monthlong internship
at what was then called the Southern
Prisoners Defense Committee, in At-
lanta. Stephen Bright, the organiza-
tion's leader, happened to be on the
same flight to Atlanta as Stevenson.
"By the time the plane landed, we were
very close," Bright recalled. "Bryan had
found his calling." He joined the group
after graduating, in , replicating
his mother's migration south---which
worried members of the family. "When
I heard he was going on his own down
there, I almost fainted," Fred Bailey,
Stevenson's cousin and a retired Phil-
adelphia police detective, said. "Bry-
an's a humble guy and a spiritual guy,
and he sees the good in everyone. But
he knew no one. And he had no fam-
ily down there."
Bright's group did death-penalty
and prisoners'-rights litigation in a
"I don't get all the hype about treadmill desks."